Tony El-Kassis was struck from behind as he walked in the parking lot of the Richmond Plaza on the morning of July 2, 2010. The 60-year-old chip truck operator died from his injuries days later. Facebook

Tony El-Kassis raised his four daughters to keep their problems to themselves, but by October 2009, there was a problem they couldn’t keep inside.

Their father had ended an affair a month earlier and his ex-mistress wouldn’t leave them alone. It was a tense time at the El-Kassis home, and for his daughters, it was hard to escape.

It found them on Facebook, at their family-run chip truck in Richmond, and at the front door, an Ottawa court heard on Monday.

Rachelle Denis, 43, called them so often looking to speak to their parents that it just became part of their routine. Sometimes she’d start calling at 5 a.m. only to call back two minutes later and ask again. She’d show up at their family home and they’d hear their father demanding loudly for her to go away.

Then she took to Facebook, and on October 8, 2009, she messaged Samira El-Kassis, claiming her father was a “predator and a rapist” who stalked her for months. “I was in despair and he violated me … I’m not the same person I was before he came and took advantage of me,” Denis wrote to El-Kassis’s daughter.

The El-Kassis family started locking their doors at night, and the daughters leaned on dark humour as a coping mechanism to talk about what was going on, with one of them telling their mother, Cecile, that something had to be done, joking that “something’s going to happen to one of us.”

Their mother told them not to worry.

The trouble at home was detailed Monday in testimony by two daughters, who gave sworn testimony at the second-degree murder trial of Denis, the ex-mistress accused of deliberately running down Tony El-Kassis on the morning of July 2, 2010. The 60-year-old chip truck man was hit from behind as he walked in the parking lot and died from his injuries days later.

Samira El-Kassis, 24, recalled the time in October 2009 when she spoke to her father about the disturbing Facebook message she got from the woman now accused of killing her father. He was watching TV and they didn’t really make eye contact. She told him not to be embarrassed about the letter.

“He just seemed tired of the whole situation and maybe slightly embarrassed about everything,” she testified.

She recalled that their home life was tense and marked with confusion and frustration.

“It was kind of getting a little weird. We assumed something else was going to come after all the phone calls,” Samira El-Kassis testified.

One day as she left the family home for work, she noticed that someone had posted a date-rape information sticker on their front door, she recalled.

Her older sister, Magida El-Kassis, 25, testified about Rachelle Denis’s “obsessive” phone calls to their home and their family-run Tony’s Chip Wagon. “It just became part of our daily lives … the calls … just part of the routine,” she said.

The sisters told court that they gave their parents the day off from the chip truck to celebrate what would be their last Canada Day. The daughters covered off their shifts at the chip stand and Tony and his longtime wife spent the day visiting family in Wakefield.

The court also heard about a family vacation to Mexico, designed to smooth things out after a months-long campaign of harassment that prompted Tony El-Kassis to call the police more than once. He told police that he feared things could turn violent. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to get a restraining order against Denis and had a lawyer send her a cease-and-desist letter.

But he wasn’t the only one complaining to police.

The court has also heard that Denis complained to Ottawa police that El-Kassis had sexually assaulted her. Police investigated he claim and El-Kassis was not charged with any crime. The police, at the time, sent an officer to check on her mental health. The jury has also heard that Denis was under the care of a doctor at the time of the 2010 crash.